Po Ve Sham - Muki Haklay’s personal blog

Map reading and navigation can be challenging – personally, finding my location on the map when touring a new place is not always easy. As a result, I thought for many years that having a device that could guide me ‘home’ would be really useful. Of course, away from home, ‘home’ may mean the hotel that I’m staying in. Today, it is possible to have such a device, as many smartphones are capable of finding their location and use services such as Google Maps.

A recent visit to Turin (Torino) made me rethink this view. The hotel I stayed in provided a typical tourist map (see example below) with a delightful depiction of the buildings in the centre of the city, clearly marked tourist attractions and, as always, some additional information on the back of the map.[ The map was produced by A&C e Turismo Torino ]

Touring the centre of a new place is a very enjoyable activity, and I realised that I didn’t want to get from the hotel to the centre in the most direct and efficient way. I really enjoy in looking in shops, public buildings, markets and other urban features along the way. Also, the fact that the map covered a large area at ‘high information density’ (the amount of information per square inch of interface area), because the printing is 6 to 10 times denser than a computer screen and arguably 60 times the area that is covered by the best smartphone screen, enabled me to see the ‘big picture’ and to notice more or less where I was heading. Instead of navigation by following a specific street, I was using the map to provide me with the general direction.

Nothing of the above is new, but, when I consider my experience and the enjoyment of touring a city and compare it to the current provision in navigation devices, I can see how much they are capable of spoiling the enjoyment of getting lost. Maybe the smart compass, as suggested by Max Egenhofer, can be useful for keeping the experience without destroying the really enjoyable aspects of it.

For a more general comment in the same vein, see Don Norman’s discussion in the recent ACM ‘Interactions’ journal for a more general complaint about devices and services which can destroy certain human enjoyments.

Early in December, the new version of the Indices of Deprivation (also known as the Index of Multiple Deprivation or IMD) was released. The first IMD was published in 2000, with a new version in 2004 which has now been updated. Created by Oxford University’s Social Disadvantage Research Centre, the indices classify each Lower-Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) in England according to the level of deprivation in multiple domains. An LSOA is an areal unit that contains on average 1500 people - a neighbourhood unit more or less.

As this is a data set widely used in many of my research projects, it was useful to analyse it and see how it changes in comparison to the previous version. There are some surprises, and, if the indices are really reflecting the changes in neighbourhood, the implication is that it is difficult to escape deprivation at the bottom of the ladder.

The IMD is very useful and has significant political implications. There are hundreds of academic articles that are based on applications of the IMD, and far more significant is the role that they play in allocating resources to local authorities through various governmental programmes such as Sure Start, which assists children in their early years, or Decent Homes, which improves the quality of the social housing stock. Of special importance are the points of 20% and 10% deprivation, as they are used widely in policy decisions. We use the IMD in the research with UnLtd to evaluate the location of projects and awardees, and in the Environmental Inequalities project with London 21 to show communities where they are positioned in the national scale.

After 7 years of use and acceptance at all levels of government in the UK (there are separate indices for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), the creation of the new indices must have been a challenging task – a lot is at stake if a specific area moves up or down. The IMD is a league table of sorts, placing each of the LSOAs (and there are around 32,500 of them) in a position relative to others. For each LSOA that is declared as deprived, another one will move up the scale and out of the bottom 20%, which usually means fewer resources for the community. Therefore, it is interesting to analyse the changes in the 2007 edition in comparison to the 2004 one.

Although the Department of Communities and Local Government staes that:

“The Index scores from 2004 cannot be compared with those from 2007. Though the two Indices are very similar, it is not valid to compare the scores between the two time points. An area’s score is affected by the scores of every other area; so it is impossible to tell whether a change in score is a real change in the level of deprivation in an area or whether it is due to the scores of other areas going up or down.”(see this document)

While this is true for each area, it is still valid to check what is the overall pattern of movement across the whole data set. To do that, each LSOA was coded with the percentile point in the IMD 2007 to which it belongs (in each percentile point there are about 325 LSOAs) and compared to the percentile position in 2004. The gap represents the relative change in the position of the LSOA – positive change means that it is now less deprived, while a negative change means that the place is now more deprived compared to 2004.

Within the span of 3 years and due to the differences in the calculation method, it is expected that specific LSOAs will shift their place – especially when the investment that was put into them is taken into account. For the sake of the discussion, let’s assume that 5% change is not too big – although it can be significant if your LSOA belonged to the 17 percentile in 2004 and now belongs to the 22 percentile. Thus, it is worth exploring where the LSOAs that moved more than 5 percentage points are. In IMD 2007, over 25% of LSOAs have shifted more than 5 percentage points and some LSOAs have moved over 20 percentage points.

The distribution of the LSOAs that moved is shown in the chart below. Notice that, although this might look like normal distribution, actually the number of changes at the lowest percentages is not equivalent to the changes at the top of the range. It might be caused by the fact that the indices are especially designed to locate deprived areas and therefore located them accurately in 2004 and the situation haven’t shifted in 2007. The problem with this is it means that, in the periods of 2001-2 (on which IMD 2004 is based) and 2004-5 (on which IMD 2007 is based), not too many places were shifted out of deprivation, while the rest of the places happily shifted about. Is it possible that the IMD team was especially careful not to bump communities that were already included in the bottom 20%?

Another way to look at the data is of course through mapping. The following map represents the LSOAs that experienced significant change of over 5%. You can download an A2 size PDF in which it is possible to zoom to a specific area to see the changes.

While most of the changes are not in the most deprived areas, it is fascinating to see the geographical pattern of change. For example, by zooming in to London, it is easy to see that Barnet, Brent and Harrow are some of the local authorities with the biggest change downward, while Camden and Westminster have seen significant change upward. As many of the changes are in the middle range, will they have policy implications?

A final point about this analysis is that it was fairly easy run: the analysis was done in 4-5 hours, using an ageing laptop (a 4 years old IBM X31), Excel 2007 and Manifold GIS 8.0. While the cartography can be improved, the ability of modern GIS to do this type of work so quickly helps in focusing on the task, and not spending the time waiting for the GIS to process data…

During the Intenrnational Cartographic Conference in Moscow last August, one of the presenters, while discussing GeoVisualisation, showed the Röyksopp (2002) ‘Remind me’ clip. As it is has been so long since I’ve followed MTV, or music videos on YouTube it was the first time I had seen it…

The common comment on this brilliant videoclip is that it is about infographics. The designers of the video stated that

“as graphic designers we appreciate the way statistics can describe the whole world. It’s funny and frightening how the smallest aspect of the way we live can be translated into numbers. It also shows how predetermined our lives can seem from this point of view.”

However, there are some interesting Geographical aspects: notice how much of the information is spatial and how scale plays an important role in the transitions between different visualisation. Other Geographical notions that this video prompts are Globalisation, Western Urbanisation, the culture and geography of consumption and surely several more.

Interestingly, 3D representation is not so central and much of the information is provided through 2D representation.